Friday, June 30, 2006

Conservatives As Alien Lifeform

I received one of the funniest emails ever today from Franklin Foer of The New Republic.

Dear Reader,

Red state and blue state America are more than different voting patterns. They are different ways of life. This week, we devote our issue to touring the conservative lifestyle--the world of conservative cookbooks, conservative folk music, and conservative investment funds. It's a world where people buy $2,000 bronze busts of George W. Bush, Ann Coulter Gone Wild videos, and kiddie books on the horrors of liberalism. This may seem like frivolous kitsch. But it's far more than that. There's a conservative culture out there--and it binds together a movement filled with pot-smoking libertarians and bible-thumping evangelicals and gun nuts who would not otherwise get along.

We sent our reporters out to live and breathe this conservative subculture. One of our writers, Eve Fairbanks, went on the conservative dating circuit--Candace Bushnell meets Russell Kirk. There are sites out there that aim to make matches of young conservatives like Sean Hannity's Hannidate. She describes the differences between the aspirations of hardy-partying right-wing men and the chaste right-wing women they desire. Also in the package, the historian Rick Perlstein places the conservative subculture in historical perspective, tracing its roots back to the Goldwater era. He excavates and explains the continued relevance of the EP, "Folk Songs to Bug Liberals." The album's a classic.

It is amazing how out of touch that highly partisan/ideological folks can become to view their opponents as almost alien. I have been around many conservatives my entire life and never met anyone that come close to this bizarre description.

This is yet another example of the 1% of highly ideological people on the left lobbing grenades at the 1% of the highly ideological people on the right. All while the rest of us scratch our heads in amazement at such insular attitudes.